The Thursday Market is an app for SUNY New Paltz's famous Thursday Market, with all the information for both vendors and customers in one easy to use, visually appealing place. The Thursday Market was a group project Lizzie Blasco and Alyssa DiBartolo, with me as the art director. The app's pastel color palette and fun patterns reflects the emphasis on the vendors' creativity every week.
There were two very important rules we followed throughout the process of creating the prototype, from the UX to the visuals: keep it simple and make it visually appealing. The purpose of the app is to create a smooth shopping experience for both customers and vendors of New Paltz's Thursday Market, and was specifically created with the intention of simplifying communication between vendors and market goers. The Thursday Market allows market runners and vendors to send important market information to other app users, such as communicating with their customers generally or directly to provide information regarding their attendance, preferred payment, and supply. We really wanted to bring more awareness to the market and create a space where students could find and support small businesses.
As the art director for the project, it was my job to create the visuals. Since the app's purpose is to highlight an event at New Paltz, we wanted to use our school colors: blue and orange. Once we agreed on our two base colors, I created a color palette that felt like spring, since the market ends in the winter and restarts in the spring. After researching the vendors over the past few years, we found six main categories of products: food, jewelry, entertainment, clothing, beauty & hygiene, and art. I created the patterns so that each category page would have its own individual visual language.
Before starting the visual language, we spent a lot of time researching user experience and how our interactions would work, including process flowcharts, user journey maps, and information architecture charts. Because this app was such a big project and we knew we would have a lot of interactions within the app, we dedicated at least three weeks to figure out how The Thursday Market would be structured so we could map out the interactions.